Zalman ZM80D-HP: Make Your Graphics Card Completely Noiseless. Page 4

Every overclocker knows that besides excellent coolers and unique PC cases Zalman is producing cooling systems for graphics cards. One of the most efficient of Zalman’s passive cooling solutions for graphics cards, the ZM80D-HP model, is going to be the subject of this review.

The temperature data were measured after an hour and a half of the system’s being in each of the test modes. To read the temperature of the GPU (“Core”) and the surface of the graphics card’s PCB (“Ambient”) I used RivaTuner. This utility can read data from the thermodes of the RADEON X800 XT, one of which is located in the GPU die and another is built into the monitoring chip found on the face side of the PCB near the GPU voltage regulator. I also measured the temperature of the graphics memory chips and of the air inside the system case using a Fluke54-II thermometer with its sensors (one of the sensors is shown in the photo below – it’s pressed to the surface of a memory chip):

The second sensor was placed one centimeter above the bottom of the system case.